My brother ordered a new laptop before heading off to college, and rather than take it out of the box and configure it myself like I usually do (because it saves me hours of questions and lots of “Can you explain what Feature X does”), I instead deferred the task onto him, figuring a college-bound honor student would be able to make sense of turning it on and getting it running with the software he uses. Oops.

The day it arrived, I hauled the box upstairs to his room for him to find when he got home. When he got back, I heard the expected “Sweet! It’s finally here!” Approximately twenty minutes later, I hear a knock on my door, and open it to a rather bewildered expression plastered across my brother’s face.

“My computer won’t start.”

I found this odd, but figuring that it was a DOA piece of hardware, I shuffled down the hallway into his room, where the laptop in question was sitting on the floor, all manners of papers, plastic packaging, and more or less every game CD he owned spread out around the room. I pressed the power button, and was greeted with an error message that basically came down to a device driver conflict. Puzzled at how a faulty device driver would escape a factory installation, I asked him what he was doing when it stopped working.

“Well…I installed (insert name of some ancient Virtual CD Drive program here), and it said I had to reboot the system. It never came back up again.”

I was stunned. He had this thing out of the box for not even twenty minutes, and it was now in an unbootable state. I've committed some pretty impressive screw-ups in my day (for example, going through and deleting all the msvcrt files back when my parents got their first Windows 95 machine to "save space"), but this was unparalleled in my memory.

Next time, I’ll set it up myself. It’ll save me the two hours of profanities and dirty looks to get the machine back up and running again.

LieutenantFrost:

“Well…I installed (insert name of some ancient Virtual CD Drive program here), and it said I had to reboot the system. It never came back up again.”

morbiuswilters:

Is it my... evil twin?

Oh sure, he's the evil one. Everyone will believe that...

Seriously, though, you'd better file a complaint with the International Avatar Organization for Avatar Infringement.

bstorer:

Seriously, though, you'd better file a complaint with the International Avatar Organization for Avatar Infringement.

But...I made that right after I joined...I don't think moribus had that avatar yet. Can someone verify?

And the evil twin is...his twin. Are you a clone? More specifically, an android/robot? And if so, what sort of powers do you have?

LieutenantFrost:

But...I made that right after I joined...I don't think moribus had that avatar yet. Can someone verify?

It's true. Here's the headers for your avatar image:

$ telnet forums.thedailywtf.com 80
Trying 74.50.106.245...
Connected to forums.thedailywtf.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /users/avatar.aspx?userid=11348 HTTP/1.1
Host: forums.thedailywtf.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 15:37:56 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
CommunityServer: 3.1.20917.1142
Cache-Control: public
Expires: Tue, 13 May 2008 15:19:53 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:09:57 GMT
ETag: 3/3/2008 1:09:57 PM
Vary: *
Content-Type: image/Jpeg
Content-Length: 2055

And here's morbius' picture:

$ telnet forums.thedailywtf.com 80
Trying 74.50.106.245...
Connected to forums.thedailywtf.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /users/avatar.aspx?userid=10835 HTTP/1.1
Host: forums.thedailywtf.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 15:37:02 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
CommunityServer: 3.1.20917.1142
Cache-Control: public
Expires: Tue, 13 May 2008 15:08:53 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:48:57 GMT
ETag: 4/14/2008 7:48:57 PM
Vary: *
Content-Type: image/Jpeg
Content-Length: 2571

Took him over a month to copy your idea! That's the real wtf! 

Nandurius:

LieutenantFrost:

But...I made that right after I joined...I don't think moribus had that avatar yet. Can someone verify?

 

It's true.

Dear, God! Morbius was the imposter all along!

He IS a robot! I knew it!

Nandurius:

Took him over a month to copy your idea! That's the real wtf! 

I'm not sure if I trust Community Server to return information properly.  However, it could be correct, but the idea was so obvious that it's pretty likely two people would come up with it.  It's not likely I saw one of Lieutenant's 5 or 6 posts and decided to rip it off.  Also, he didn't copy the design or colors accurately, so at least I have that.

morbiuswilters:

I'm not sure if I trust Community Server to return information properly.  However, it could be correct, but the idea was so obvious that it's pretty likely two people would come up with it.  It's not likely I saw one of Lieutenant's 5 or 6 posts and decided to rip it off.  Also, he didn't copy the design or colors accurately, so at least I have that.

I don't know about you, but I'm simply not going to worry about it. Move along, people. Move along.

 At the OP:

Windows Vista? When I first installed Vista, one of the first things I tried to do was to install Daemon Tools with virtual drives... The system froze during the install process and wouldn't come back up. I managed to fix it by booting to the fancy schmancy Recovery Environment, ignoring the fact that it couldn't find anything wrong, and then using the Command Prompt they included (I guess they knew it wouldn't work automatically half the time) to futz around until i figured out what the offending driver was. 

morbiuswilters:

It's not likely I saw one of Lieutenant's 5 or 6 posts and decided to rip it off.

LIAR! I demand you change your avatar to spectate's picture immediately to begin paying back your dept to this community!

AmmoQ, I trust you will enforce my judgement...

PerdidoPunk:

When I first installed Vista, one of the first things I tried to do was to install Daemon Tools with virtual drives... The system froze during the install process and wouldn't come back up.

Same here, but a BSOD if I recall correctly.

Vista's compatibility checker thingy actually tells you this ahead of time though.

PerdidoPunk:

 At the OP: 

Windows Vista? When I first installed Vista, one of the first things I tried to do was to install Daemon Tools with virtual drives... The system froze during the install process and wouldn't come back up. I managed to fix it by booting to the fancy schmancy Recovery Environment, ignoring the fact that it couldn't find anything wrong, and then using the Command Prompt they included (I guess they knew it wouldn't work automatically half the time) to futz around until i figured out what the offending driver was. 

You are correct! Vista Home Premium. And I'm pretty sure I could have figured out how to get it back up and running again, but I reasoned that since it was a mere 20 minutes away from factory state anyway, it would have been easier to just start over again. 

LieutenantFrost:

it would have been easier to just start over again. 

Personal preference of course, but I would certainly argue that uninstalling one program is easier than reinstalling.

To each his own though.

Not sure why you consider this a WTF though, but not like we have had a whole lot of gems in the sidebar recently anyway.

I'm running Daemon Tools on my Home Premium box just fine. Is this issue only with the 32-bit version of Vista or did I somehow magically dodge a bullet?

Welbog:

I'm running Daemon Tools on my Home Premium box just fine. Is this issue only with the 32-bit version of Vista or did I somehow magically dodge a bullet?

I have no idea, but I would imagine they would have fixed it by now too in newer versions of D-Tools. 

MasterPlanSoftware:

Not sure why you consider this a WTF though, but not like we have had a whole lot of gems in the sidebar recently anyway.

Half a mug?  That's pretty fucking useless, isn't it?

Since the OP says it was "ancient", it was probably a pre-Vista version of D-Tools. I'm running v4.12.3 on Vista Home Premium 64bit just fine.

I always have a tendency to reinstall the OS from scratch anyhow whenever I purchase a new system. Manufactureres theses that have too many tendencies to install lotsa crapware on the system so is so much easier for me to take the orginal disk and [n|v]Lite the crap out as well as add in the new patches and drivers in one go. I always end up with a much cleaner, faster and more stable installtion than the installtion that came with the system in the first place.

MarcB:

Since the OP says it was "ancient", it was probably a pre-Vista version of D-Tools. I'm running v4.12.3 on Vista Home Premium 64bit just fine.

EDIT: Blah, I should probably make sure I'm crediting correctly.

morbiuswilters:

Half a mug?  That's pretty fucking useless, isn't it?

As is the OP.

LieutenantFrost:

Although I'm still a bit surprised that it runs fine all the way up to SP2, but won't run on Vista 32-bit.

Considering it uses a virtual SCSI device driver, and Vista's driver system is pretty drastically modified, I am not surprised at all.